The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Disability

Working across time periods and critical contexts, this volume provides the most comprehensive overview of literary representations of disability.

Clare Barker (Edited by), Stuart Murray (Edited by)

9781107458130, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 16 November 2017

280 pages
22.7 x 15.2 x 1.7 cm, 0.43 kg

'… is an essential resource for scholars, academics and those with personal interest in the depiction and portrayal of disability narratives both historical and contemporary.' Heather Lacey, British Society for Literature and Science Reviews

This Companion analyzes the representation of disability in literatures in English, including American and postcolonial writing, across all major time periods and through a variety of critical approaches. Through the alternative ideas of mind and embodiment generated by physiological and psychological impairments, an understanding of disability narrative changes the way we read literature. With contributions from major figures in literary disability studies, The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Disability covers a wide range of impairments, including cognitive difference, neurobehavioral conditions, and mental and chronic illnesses. This book shows how disability demands innovation in literary form and aesthetics, challenges the notion of a human 'norm' in the writing of character, and redraws the ways in which writing makes meaning of the broad spectrum of humanity. It will be a key resource for students and teachers of disability and literary studies.

1. Introduction: on reading disability in literature Clare Barker and Stuart Murray
Part I. Across Literatures: 2. Monsters, saints, and sinners: disability in Medieval literature Edward Wheatley
3. Early modern literature and disability studies Allison P. Hobgood and David Houston Wood
4. Disability and deformity: function impairment and aesthetics in the long eighteenth century Essaka Joshua
5. Embodying affliction in nineteenth-century fiction Martha Stoddard Holmes
6. Paralyzed modernities and biofutures: bodies and minds in modern literature Michael Davidson
7. The ambiguities of inclusion: disability in contemporary literature Stuart Murray
8. 'Radiant affliction': disability narratives in postcolonial literature Clare Barker
Part II. Across Critical Methods: 9. Disability and the edges of intersectionality Alison Kafer and Eunjung Kim
10. The world-making potential of contemporary crip/queer literary and cultural production Robert McRuer
11. Race and disability in US literature Michelle Jarman
12. Disability and women's writing Sami Schalk
13. Disability in genre fiction Ria Cheyne
14. Signifying selves: disability and life writing G. Thomas Couser
15. Disability rhetorics Jay Dolmage
16. Afterword Petra Kuppers.

Subject Areas: Literary companions, book reviews & guides [DSRC], Literary studies: general [DSB], Literary theory [DSA]